In a major blog entry on the highly respected Forbes.com (an adjunct of Forbes Magazine) writer Mark P. Mills details the reasons to follow “Exxon and T Boone Pickens; go long natural gas and frack-baby-frack” which is a variant on the 2008 mantra of “drill-baby-drill.”
Mills points out that while Egypt is a minor player in the international oil chessboard, “because of geopolitics, there are already renewed calls for doing something about America’s Energy Policy and the perennial attempt to reduce American energy imports.”
Mills reminds his readers of Boone’s Pickens Plan advertisements which began in 2008 and agrees that “the quickest and simplest impactful things we can do are all associated with America’s glut of natural gas.”
Mills correctly reminds his readers that
Energy necessarily underpins everything, not just industry: agriculture, IT, residences, travel, offices, vacations. Nothing is built, nothing operates, nothing moves and nothing survives, nothing exists without using energy.
He joins Boone in saying that
One simple focused step: unleash natural gas and you can move the needle in million-barrel-per-day increments at a price and in a time-frame that nothing else on the table can.
A number like two million barrels per day of oil displaced by natural gas is comfortably in the range of both realistic and meaningful.
Because of the huge amount of natural gas which is now available in America
The U.S. is now in the Qatar-class for hydrocarbon (natural gas) resources – and it’s right here. The known resources keep rising as we explore from sea to shining sea. As a practical matter, the time from discovery to production for natural gas is much faster than for America’s deep off-shore oil resources. So the mantra should be frack-baby-frack.
Mills concludes his essay by writing:
Energy is serious business. Sometimes with age, wisdom eludes you; witness Mubarak’s obstinate avoidance of decades of pleas to expand rights in Egypt. Sometimes it doesn’t; witness Mr. Pickens persistent championing of abundant American natural gas. That part of the Pickens’ Plan is timely and spot on.
To read the entire article by Mr. Mills, click HERE.
— The Pickens Team